Instructor Spotlight: Rita Reznikova

Tell us about your background and what inspired you to teach this course

I am a Tufts alumna A08 who majored in international relations and minored in mass media/communications. I got a great foundational liberal arts education here and learned to think critically and ask the right questions. When I graduated, I knew I liked writing but wasn’t sure how to make it my “real job”. I considered publishing, which at the time was not very lucrative. I ended up working at agencies and in-house in the tech industry, eventually working my way up at companies like Facebook, Instagram, Tripadvisor and Pegasystems. I built a career both in content marketing and user experience (UX) content design (also known as UX writing). Before coming back to Tufts this summer, I spent nearly 15 years in big-tech and adjacent companies in multiple writing-related roles. When I graduated, there were fewer resources about career paths that people interested in global affairs and writing could pursue. For me, tech was a blend of both – working on products that could reach a wide variety of people and address global problems, but also apply strategic and creative storytelling skills. I felt like I would have benefitted from knowing what all the options were – and I think today’s students can benefit from hearing from different types of writers gainfully employed in the world of business and technology.

Your class focuses on the intersection of writing and tech. Tell us a bit about what forms of writing fall into this intersection and how they appear in the tech sector

I like to tell my students that “writing” isn’t the thing that you produce as your final product. At work, your writing is a tool to accomplish something else – some sort of business goal. For example, we started the course looking at UX writing / content design – where the business goal is to guide the user through an experience. Next, we discuss technical writing, where the goal is to support a user through something or give them resources to consult. Then we’ll talk about instructional design, where we teach our user or enable them to do things. Writers and communicators have important roles to play at every part of the product development lifecycle in tech – but those roles can be very different, and as a result, so is your product, the goals you set to achieve, and the responsibilities of other people you’ll work with. I want to show my students that their title doesn’t need to say “writer” in order to do much of that deep thinking and empathy work.

How do you envision AI being used by writers in the tech sector, and what challenges might this pose? 

AI is certainly shifting the landscape and giving us experimental new tools to use in our work. There’s a lot of fear that writing jobs will go away as a result of AI. I think it’s a very exciting time and we should understand how to work with these tools and use our strong liberal arts education to infuse deeper value into our work while AI helps us out. I encourage my writers to embrace these tools responsibly and understand where they’re useful now and where they’re not useful yet or won’t ever be useful. Students need to practice doing the work with and without AI, but most importantly, I want to teach them how to think about meeting business objectives and evaluating the work that words do in an application. AI may redistribute some of the work we’ve typically done across different roles, but it’s not going to take away the thinking, ethics and empathy work that writers often lead, and technologists need to understand that AI does not replace strategically thinking people.  

For students who want to write in the tech sector, what is one piece of advice you would give?

I have two pieces of advice. 1) Embrace the deep thinking skills that writing gives you but position yourself as more than a writer. You can write, that’s great! How are you going to use writing as a tool to achieve results for your target audience and for your business? And 2) Embrace new tools but evaluate them and their output critically. Just like writing is a tool to do something else, there are now amazing tools available to you to get to a final product faster, but they are fallible, they aren’t sentient, they don’t think holistically and they need your intelligence to guide them. Learn how to use them to do good work, and also importantly, when not to use them.

What is something coming up in your course that you are excited about? Can you tell us a bit about recent guest speakers you’ve had in your class? 

We will be welcoming more guest speakers from companies like Doordash, Athenahealth, Instagram and others. I’m super excited for my students to speak to professionals in this field and connect with them directly. Many of my speakers are good friends of mine and former colleagues, so it’s wonderful to see them and for us to reconnect while giving back to the community.

Rita Reznikova A08 has worked as a UX writing and content strategy leader for companies like Instagram, Tripadvisor, Facebook, Pegasystems, Forrester Research and others. She has been a hiring manager as well as a writer herself in many of these roles at top Boston and Silicon Valley based companies over the past 15 years, most recently as a team leader at Instagram. She currently has her own digital consulting practice, Marlena Marketing LLC, providing content strategy and UX content design services to professional clients, and is also a career coach in interdisciplinary writing careers in the world of technology and business. She recently joined the Fletcher School as the Associate Director of Marketing.